Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: FILE
WHETHER Cyril Ramaphosa, the new ANC deputy president, can make any difference in the troubled ANC government will depend heavily on how much power, support and freedom President Jacob Zuma gives him.
In the ANC, the reality is that the position of president is all-powerful, with the deputy serving at his behest, no matter the rhetoric about “collective” leadership by party hacks. ANC presidential leadership battles are no-holds-barred fights because the winner can bestow dizzying patronage to loyalists: from government tenders to heads of state-owned companies and official commissions; he can deny rivals and critics jobs in government and the private sector; or he can simply use all-powerful state security agencies to sideline them.
The current ANC leadership collective is also loaded with Zuma allies – some of whom will be very suspicious of Ramaphosa. There is a real danger that Ramaphosa’s voice will be drowned out by the pro-Zuma leadership majority.
In the ANC itself, a tipping point has been reached. The gulf between the bling world of the ANC leadership and the daily grind of ordinary members may have become so wide that many ANC members who have had a deep affinity with the party may no longer be able to identify themselves with the leaders and the party. If Zuma continues his poor, scandal-prone public service delivery and autopilot presidency – and ANC voters start to abandon him, Ramaphosa will be damned by association with Zuma.
In the run-up to the 2014 national elections, Zuma desperately needs Ramaphosa, who has a reputation as a dynamic, effective and relatively clean manager, as an electoral crutch to counter-balance his own battered presidential image.
Zuma has brought in Ramaphosa, the former general secretary of both the ANC and the National Union of Mineworkers, and now a successful black businessman, to: restore strained relations with the business sector and the markets; bring management capacity to government; bring an accomplished negotiator to mediate the myriad political, economic and social conflicts the ANC government is and will be facing.
At the ANC’s Mangaung conference, Ramaphosa effectively neutralised the threat of former ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe. Because Ramaphosa essentially fished from the same ANC voter support pond as Motlanthe, those who opposed Zuma at the conference and who may have considered leaving the ANC after Zuma was re-elected may now be persuaded to stay because of the presence of Ramaphosa.
It is likely that the prospect of an easy path to the ANC and South African presidency was one of the key reasons why Ramaphosa accepted the job as Zuma’s deputy. Ramaphosa, by agreeing to be part of Zuma’s slate gets a short-cut back to high political office on the back of the constituencies who have lifted Zuma into the ANC and South African presidency.
Currently, Ramaphosa on his own, having been out of political action for such a long time, does not have the grassroots networks needed to win an ANC presidential campaign.
Further, the cohort of ANC leaders of Ramaphosa’s generation with presidential ambitions is particularly large: from Tokyo Sexwale, the housing settlements minister, to Mathews Phosa, the ANC’s former treasurer. By attaching himself to the Zuma slate, Ramaphosa was carried beyond the reach of his generational rivals.
In the deal, cobbled together between Zuma and Ramaphosa, Zuma will be the face of the ANC in the 2014 national elections, and after winning will gradually transfer power to Ramaphosa. Although there is no firm timetable or detail of how such a transfer of power will happen, the idea is that at some point between the 2014 national elections and the ANC’s 2017 national conference Ramaphosa will be given the country presidency, while Zuma retains the ANC presidency.
According to the Mangaung Zuma slate calculations, Ramaphosa will be elected ANC president at the party’s 2017 national conference – with the backing of Zuma.
If the ANC, led by Zuma, does badly in the 2014 elections (falling to 55% and below – as some ANC leaders fear), perhaps losing another province, there is a real chance the ANC will ask Zuma to stand down earlier. In such an event, Ramaphosa, as Zuma’s deputy will be the natural successor.
In the mid-1990s, ANC strategists put together a similar arrangement for Ramaphosa with Thabo Mbeki, in which Mbeki would succeed then ANC and South African president Nelson Mandela, and Ramaphosa would succeed Mbeki.
That deal turned spectacularly sour for Ramaphosa – as Mbeki turned against him.
Many of the Motlanthe supporters have warned Ramaphosa not to trust that Zuma will implement his promises of handing over power. They point out that before the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane national conference, which saw Zuma oust Mbeki as president, Zuma promised he would only stay in the presidency for one term.
He has reneged on this promise.
Nevertheless, Ramaphosa will, as deputy ANC president, assume the position in the Zuma cabinet of “head of government business”. Mbeki, during the presidency of Mandela, was also “head of government business”, and used the position to great effect. Mbeki turned the position into the equivalent of a prime minister.
Mbeki was effective at the time, because Mandela as principal, gave Mbeki full control of government and the ANC backed him on almost every issue – even where Mandela disagreed with Mbeki.
Whether Zuma will hand control to Ramaphosa in the same way Mandela did to Mbeki is highly doubtful. Zuma has made contradictory promises to a dizzyingly wide number of interest groups, owes patronage to an equally vast network of benefactors, and will be expected to protect the sprawling business, political and personal interests of a web of allies, friends and family.
Zuma, in his second term will also be trying to navigate the myriad of uncleared corruption allegations against him.
To do all this, Zuma will want to have full control of party and government – rather than delegating it to Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa is in real danger of having very little real power in Zuma’s government, yet having to share responsibility for Zuma’s failures.
- William Gumede is author of Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg)
Sobhuza
January 29, 2013
A good read with some few inaccuracies. Firstly, Zuma never said he will run for one term. He has on many occasions said that he would do so if it was for him, but if the ANC want him for more than one term, he wouldn’t disagree to that. It may sound semantically, but that’s what he said. Secondly, Cyril Ramaphosa was never out of action as he served in the ANC NEC all along. Maybe being out of government is seen as being out of action? I doubt.
On succession, I don’t think Ramaphosa will climb the ladder to the ANC Presidency. In my view Nkosazana Zuma is very likely to come in. It will be a first in the ANC to have a President with no real support from his province or even the one he resides on. ANC has a lot of tribalism which will take years to clean out.
Putuma
January 29, 2013
The writer makes interesting points that are obviously informed by a good understanding of the dynamics of power transfer in the ANC. However, pundits should learn to eat a little bit of humble pie regarding predictions on the future of the ANC, or its leadership. The Polokwane and Mangaung elective conferences left a lot of speculators with eggs on their faces. Things are not quite that predictable in the ANC. So, the writer’s comment is plausible, but we should take it with a pinch of salt. What I also do not share is the notion that Cyril Ramaphosa is this unassuming passenger in this wave of political mobility that will culminate with him on the helm. No. Cyril is as calculating and as sneaky as his President, and when or if he becomes president himself, it won’t just be because of his position in the succession line; he will most certainly have had a role in the preparation and the plotting. So, I don’t hold my breath about him receiving a backlash for tying his future to that of Zuma. It has been this way for a very long time. It’s just that this time Cyril is emerging out of the woods and onto the forefront. Hardly an accident ! Now, we like to hold on to the notion of Cyril as the one that should have followed Madiba, the one that is untainted, the one who earned a lot of political credit for his much-celebrated role during CODESA, but in my opinion the events of the last year or so, have started to reveal Cyril as part of the whole bag. White people and big business just love to pin their hopes on Cyril because of that CODESA legend and Cyril’s conduct in business, but in the next few months we may learn a whole lot more about his presidential ambitions, about his share of the morass that has befallen the ANC, and who knows what else. I hope we don’t get shocked to realise that our angel’s wings got clipped a long time ago, perhaps before Marikana. Cyril is and has always been just like the rest of them, hence I doubt that there will be an undue backlash that he will inherit from a potential fallout with Zuma. I believe that Cyril is exactly where he wants to be, doing what he had long prepared himself to do. Whichever way it turns out, is exactly how we should judge him, for his active engineering of the situation, not for his osmotic association with Zuma.